I'm setting up a sheevaplug to replace my old and noisy home server (samba, apache2, mysql, subversion). I'm using the kernel image and rootfs that come with the SheevaPlug Installer Alpha-6 package, which work perfectly except for one annoying issue: my external USB drive fails to mount at boot time (when it says "Mounting local filesystems"), whereas it mounts just fine after the boot sequence has completed. The device is specified in fstab in terms of UUID, but using other means (such as a plain "/dev/sda1") makes no difference. The fstab entry is correct because, as I said, mount -a works fine after login.

I suspect this to be a timing problem. Probably /etc/init.d/mountall.sh is being executed before the USB drive is scanned and recognized. Is there anything I can do to force mountall.sh to wait until the USB bus scan has finished? The external drive contains data for various servers that are launched at boot time, so having it mounted automatically is crucial...